Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  If you're counting, the Port of Liverpool Building, an exercise in Edwardian opulence, formerly the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board Building, is the Third Grace. There was going to be a fourth but there isn't now. It's all been a bit of an embarrassment, really. There were certainly some strong opinions expressed back there on the walls of the Liverpool Vision offices. Essentially what happened is that Liverpool Vision ran a competition to design a Fourth Grace and something called 'The Cloud' by Nicholas Alsop was chosen. We will never see it as intended now but from the artist's impression I glanced at, it looked a bit like the rings of Saturn done in melting Lego. Anyway, what no one thought to take into account is that the Pier Head is a World Heritage Site and the mandarins of that scheme flatly refused permission for 'The Cloud' on the grounds that it was too big and not 'in keeping'. This has polarised the locals into traditionalists who are secretly quite pleased and a surprising number of modernists who have blamed 'Victorian theme-parking' and small-mindedness. As one critic has wailed in the magazine Downtown Liverpool, 'Why did we let height restrictions kill this project? Are we Milton Keynes or Manhattan?'

  The answer is quite obviously Manhattan. As my friend the writer Andrew Harrison put it to me, 'Liverpool is the easternmost city of the United States. Think about it; a bustling Atlantic seaport full of off-duty sailors, Irish, Chinese, Catholics, black marketeers and the like, a huge diverse working-class population.' After Liverpool, it's next stop New York, and the city's culture has always reflected that, from its markedly transatlantic street speech and slick slang to the young 'uns long-standing predilection for blues, black music, R&B and rock and roll, brought home by sailors ('the Cunard Yanks') as presents for siblings and sweethearts. Whereas London looks towards Europe, wants to be more stylish than Milan, Paris or Rome, Liverpool emulates the brash, wisecracking melting-pot mentality of the Big Apple.

  If you want to see and feel just how American Liverpool is, though, you have to see it from the water. This is my intention: to take to the Mersey again. But the woman in the ferries office is looking doubtful. 'The midday's definitely not sailin', sweetheart, and I don't wanna sell yers a ticket that's no good so why not come back at half twelve and we'll see, alright, luv?' Outside, sheets of hail moved horizontally across spumes of icy water. I left her trying to explain the vagaries of Britain's weather to a couple from Somalia. It was the week the clocks went forward. British Summer Time.

  I spent the tense intervening period in the Museum of Liverpool Life. Like the World Museum, this is very much a modern artefact, less about the grandeur of past civilisations than the experience of ordinary people. There's a soberingly critical exhibit on Liverpool's race relations, as well as a tableau almost-but-not-quite celebrating the city's long-standing enthusiasm for rioting, from the Dock Strikes of 1911 to petrol bombs in Toxteth in the eighties. There's a section of the old Kop terracing and the River Room is an evocative little space full of old home movies and reverberating to anachronistic pre-Beatle pop, devoted to memories of the days when nearby New Brighton was a bona fide tourist resort.

  To my (and the Somalian couple's) delight, as well as a small knot of hardy and slightly damp would-be mariners, there is to be a one o'clock sailing, not from here, though, but from the Isle of Man steampacket landing a couple of hundred drenching yards along Canada Boulevard. The Boulevard is lined with tributes paid for by the governments of Canada, the Netherlands and America, an avenue of trees here, a sombre plinth there, reminding one of 'those who have no grave but the sea' and the city's importance during World War Two convoy missions.

  It's impossible to set foot on the Mersey ferry without hearing the strains of Gerry and the Pacemakers' 'Ferry 'Cross The Mersey' in your head. Literally impossible. Because they play it at the start and finish of the trip. I've spoken to Scousers and woollybacks alike who find this appallingly cheesy. I think it's kind of cute, although surely they only play it on the hour-long cruise, not the direct crossings for the Birkenhead commuters. Otherwise Gerry Marsden would be the most hated man in the city. As it is, the movie Ferry Cross the Mersey, from whence the song came, seems to have disappeared from the popular consciousness (never on telly, no DVD) even though it's quite a neat little snapshot of Merseybeat, albeit via Cilla and Jimmy Savile rather than the Fab Four.

  The taped commentary proclaims proudly: 'Welcome to the most famous ferry in the world.' It's a bold claim. If they have a taped commentary on the Statten Island ferry or the ferry across the Styx to the Underworld, then maybe that makes the same claim. I'm happy to go along with the Mersey one though. In the interests of research, I strain to hear the doubtless fascinating titbits of ferry-related information but it's hard to hear above the mournful howling of the wind and the clanking of doors and the shifting of tables. None of my fellow passengers seem to be interested. An over-boisterous grandad is encouraging his 'little smasher' in pink to sing and dance, pepped up by a family-sized bottle of Coke and some pick'n'mix. Two severe-looking German men in bottle-green anoraks are both training their camcorders on the Cammell Laird shipyard across the river. Sixty or so years ago, when this waterway led out on to U-boat-infested ocean and when the heroism of the Atlantic convoys were all that stood between Britain and starvation, Germans in the Mersey making films of an important military/industrial installation would have been A Very Bad Thing Indeed. At this remove, though, I think a citizen's arrest will be unnecessary.

  The ferry cruises down-river to avoid the passing cargo boats before heading straight across the Mersey to Seacombe. Amazingly, ferry boats have done this for 800 years, since 1150 when the monks of Birkenhead rowed passengers by hand across the river. Back then, the Mersey was far more treacherous and the crossing extremely hazardous, taking at least two hours. By the 1500s the ferries had acquired the very latest in modern technology, namely sails and rigging, and raced across in an hour and a half. After risking hypothermia on the promenade deck, I go to the cafe for a reviving Kenco. 'How long does the round trip take?' I ask the girl behind the counter. She frowns sweetly. 'Oh, I don't really know... I suppose I should, shouldn't I?' she giggles, as if I'd asked her the circumference of Neptune.

  Twenty minutes of chilly, choppy river-going later, you're docking with maximum clanking and shouting at Seacombe, gateway to Birkenhead, which from here looks just like Trumpton. These days there are just three stops on the ferry. But in the Victorian steam heyday, boats buzzed between Birkenhead and Woodside, Tranmere, Rock Ferry, New Ferry, Bromborough, Eastham, Wallasey, Seacombe, Egremont and New Brighton. Individual boats became famous, like the Royal Iris, given the prefix Royal for seeing active service at Zeebrugge in World War One. Later, it was known as the Fish and Chip Boat, hosting evening entertainment cruises where Scouse talent from Gerry And The Pacemakers and The Searchers to The Beatles and Elvis Costello played. It even got its own series on ITV in 1979, The Mersey Pirate, which I don't remember but was probably crap.

  After Birkenhead, the ship heads up-river past the aforementioned Cammell Laird shipyards and out towards Eastham, where the Manchester Ship Canal begins (if you fancy a long day afloat, it's six hours to Salford and a bus brings you back to Liverpool) and the Tranmere Oil Refinery where the pipeline runs to Stanlow. Last time I came that way I took the train under the river to meet Half Man Half Biscuit, the world's leading pop satirists and Tranmere Rovers fans.

  This time, though, I'm trying to get the circulation back in my hands and wishing that the cafe sold whisky to go in this Kenco. I remember the wry words of Liverpool striker John Aldridge, commenting on the intense heat in Florida for the '94 World Cup: 'It gets like this in Liverpool when you're on the ferry and the sun reflects off the Mersey'

  You could almost forget the cold that's now deep in your marrow, though, when the ferry swings around in a great loop and begins its return to the Pier Head. First the city's two cathedrals come into view through the grey murk; a Protestant one designed by a Catholic, and a Catholic one designed by a Protestant, a piece of s
ixties concrete psychedelia known as Paddy's Wigwam.

  Then as you approach the Pier Head, Liverpool suddenly turns it on in a dazzling display that has everything to do with Manhattan and nothing to do with Milton Keynes. From here, you can see that though Liverpool is twinned with Odessa, Dublin, Cologne and others, its real twin is New York. You wonder if the Rough Guide writer could have been so slighting and pitying if they'd seen Liverpool from the prow of the ferry. There cannot be anywhere else like this in England.

  The commentary draws our attention skywards to the top of the Liver Building and the two liver birds in their lofty and solitary splendour. 'They can never mate as they have their backs to each other; she looks out to sea for the returning sailor, he looks towards the city to see if the pubs are open.' The ancient legend (which stretches back a barely believable, erm, eighty years) states that if the birds should ever leave, then the city will crumble and disappear. I doubt very much that this will happen since, unlike the similarly significant ravens at the Tower of London, the liver birds are made of metal and nailed to the top of the building. I suppose it's possible a scally might rob them and sell them for scrap in Bootle.

  Just as we're about to disembark and the crew start to do manly, maritime-ish things with chains and gangplanks, a fellow passenger sidles up to me, a middle-aged man in a trench coat and flamboyant trilby. I make the mistake of catching his eye and am treated to a verbal assault that is both quintessentially Scouse in its speed and prolixity and quite, quite mad; beginning as a kind of rhapsody of complaint against the Isle of Man steam-packet company and swelling impressively to a symphony of meaningless rage.

  'You see, dey say that they let ar lads use their landing stage but if we had done this properly we could have finished our own landing stage and den we wouldn't be in this mess. . . See there, they lock ar lads out and won't let them get near the boat. Fucken ridiculous. You know how much these landing stages cost, ey, do yer . . .'

  Erm , not really.

  '. . .and then you see the amount that they spend on sculptures and, and, and. . . I mean I know it was a shame what happened to that lad Anthony Walker but last week a white lad was murdered and you know how much it got in the Echo (holds finger and thumb a centimetre apart)... That much. Now when I gerrof this ferry I'm going for a bevy with my mates in the town – black lads I used to work with on the boats. I'm not a racist and you know why... you know why... THERE'S NO SUCH WORD AS RACIST!'

  I'm just about to say that I'm pretty sure there is, when I notice a wide-eyed look of pity in the eyes of the ferrymen. They have clearly been privy to this wide-ranging stream-of-consciousness tirade many times before. In defiance of the safety instructions, as soon as the gangplank is down, I leap for the jetty and am off the steep ramp en route to the Albert Dock.

  The Albert Dock was an early jewel of Liverpool's civic regeneration. One of the world's first enclosed docks and with the highest density of Grade 1 listed buildings in England, you can only marvel that at one point in the 1980s, the council were going to drain it, flatten it and make it into a multi-storey car park. For many years, before their frankly treacherous sell-out to London, this was where Richard and Judy sipped elevenses and talked nut allergies and liposuction on This Morning. Behind them, the wearyingly high-spirited weatherman and local TV fixture Fred Talbot (a former biology teacher who taught The Fall's Mark E. Smith) would loon around uninformatively on a polystyrene raft in the shape of the British Isles; as he prepared to make the one-foot leap to Northern Ireland, all of Britain would hope he fell in.

  Nowadays, the Albert Dock's a curious mix of tat and art. On the quality side, there's Tate Liverpool, impressive, ultra-modern, all-Rothko poster books and carrot cake in the cafe. There's the Maritime Museum (by the way, in place of the Fourth Grace, they're going to build a new museum on the Pier Head because evidently Liverpool thinks you can never have too many museums). There's Babycream, an offshoot of the city's hugely successful superclub Cream, where you can sip a Mai Tai on an uncomfortable tan leather pouffe and hope Robbie Fowler pops in. There is the splendid launch point of the Yellow Duckmarine, a canary-coloured amphibious vehicle that churns and circles about in the Dock for a while before – in an ooh-ahh coup de théâtre loved by kids of all ages – actually rising up out of the water in a sheet of spray and taking to the streets of Liverpool. The sheer fun of the enterprise is inversely proportional to the ferocious and very un-Scouse surliness of the girl in the ticket office, who seemed to be getting divorced over the phone and regarded me as an unwelcome interruption.

  There's a ripe chunk of cheesiness, though: gift shops selling those souvenirs you might buy if very drunk or if you were a Shoreditch ironist – tea towels emblazoned with Scouse glossaries, ashtrays, posters and wristbands bearing insulting messages about whichever football team you don't support. I buy one for an Evertonian friend that reads 'Everton Are Scouse. We Are The People's Club. Liverpool People, Not The Ones Who Come Over On The Friday Night Flight From Oslo'. It takes me a while to unpack this enigmatic statement. Eventually I decode it as a sideswipe at the element in Liverpool's support, perceived or actual, who live in Scandinavia and jet in at the weekend for a spot of sexy Premiership action and a prawn sandwich rather than some gravadlax and a nil-nil draw between Bergen and Tromso. I marvel again at the unquenchable ability of football fans to make the best of anything, as Everton's long-overshadowed Bluenoses rebrand themselves the People's Club, proudly displaying community loyalty and pride where the trophies should be.

  Tucked away at the far end of the Albert Dock from Tate Liverpool is an underground exhibition that celebrates Liverpool's real cultural contribution to the world. You wondered when I'd get round to it, didn't you? Yes, Salzburg has Mozart, Shakespeare has Stratford, Liverpool, well, it has Atomic Kitten, The Swinging Blue Jeans, Sonia, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Echo And The Bunnymen, and one day they may name airports after them. Until then, though, as far as pop music goes, this city is very keen on reminding you that it's Liverpool 4, The Rest Of The World 0.

  If your city had produced one of human civilisation's most important cultural forces ever; a group of individuals who in their global significance almost transcended the bounds of the human; who became demi-gods, responsible for changing not only the sound of a planet's music and the shape of its culture but the look and structure of its societies, then you could be forgiven for making a bit of a fuss about it. Yet you can't help thinking that Liverpool does go on a bit about The Beatles.

  There are plenty of ordinary Scousers who find the cult of the Fabs embarrassing, hopelessly backward-looking and recherche. The City Fathers have no such reservations. If you arrive by plane ('Lucky you!' trills the City Guide), you 'deplane' at John Lennon International Airport, with its motto of 'Above us, only sky' taken from the glutinous anthem 'Imagine' by the airport's dedicatee. Frankly, I'd have preferred 'Nothing To Kill Or Die For . . . And No Religion Too . . . Now Visit Our Fabulous Duty-Free Shopping Area!' There's a statue of Lennon in arrivals based on the Abbey Road cover. Taken out of context, it looks like he's storming out of somewhere in a huff. This is kind of appropriate, I feel, as rather than the sainted holy man that he's now absurdly regarded as, Lennon was actually a rather sour personality, short-tempered, sulky and often cruel. I wonder if he'd have turned up for the renaming ceremony. I think he would have. I can just see him now, pulling the little curtains to one side and doing his hilarious 'mong' face.

  Liverpool's Beatle heritage industry embraces the tacky and the thoughtful simultaneously, sentimental and savvy as only Liverpool can be. Mathew Street, site of the famous Cavern Club, is now heart of the 'Cavern Quarter', and in the Cavern Walks shopping centre, incongruously alongside the Vivienne Westwood shop, you will find From Me To You: The Beatles Store (Store, not Shop – you can see who it's aimed at). Here, as you might think, you can find all manner of Beatle memorabilia from a Doug Millings Nehru jacket to a Yellow Submarine duvet cover. Alongside all this, though, is the
kind of general rock tat you'd find in Carnaby Street's sundry emporia; Motorhead bullet belts, Led Zeppelin T-shirts. I couldn't for the life of me see why: surely there can't be any shortage of Hard Day's Nighties or We Can Work It Out calculators? The store is owned by Gary Blaine, who's run it for five years. He told me this having stopped me on the way out of Cavern Walks and asking me why I was making notes in his shop. Having assured Gary that I wasn't from the Department of Fair Trading or engaged in Beatle-related industrial espionage, he became extremely personable and gave me a free map.